Month: June 2017

I read an article some time ago about a documentary called An Encounter with Simone Weil by Julia Haslett. In the article Haslett mentions two quotes by Weil, the first well known, the second not so well known:

Attention is the highest and purest form of generosity.

When you have to decide to do something, always do what will cost you the most.

I’ve also just remembered that I posted a quote from Rebecca Solnit about paying attention, and then realised that this blog is filled with posts that mention ideas to do with attention:

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Katrina McPherson, Owa Barua, Natalia Barua and I had re-edited We Record Ourselves to screen on the MediaWall at Bath Spa University. Here’s an image by Katrina that gives a pretty good sense of the scale.

The value of practice gets discussed a lot in dance. I remember US choreographer Deborah Hay saying something like, “99% of my choreography is the practice of my choreography”, and practice in the context of practice-as-research is clearly fundamental.

But I wonder about this word value. And I wondered what it might be to practise it. To have a practice of value(s).

Last year screendance artist Katrina McPherson asked Owa Barua, Natalia Barua and me to be involved in a project that explored ideas to do with archives, memory, dance and film. We ended up making We Record Ourselves.

This is a new version of We Record Ourselves specially edited for the Bath Spa MediaWall. The edit sustains the key themes of the original versions (remembering, forgetting, archives and dance) while exploring the possibilities of the scale of the MediaWall and the transient nature of its audiences.

The MediaWall edit is below but watching it here won’t be quite the same as the full scale version (more than 7m high)!